pure beauty of form as we find in
Tennyson. He can handle skillfully many kinds of meter, as is shown in
_The Song of the English_, _The Ballad of East and West_, _The Song of
the Banjo_, and many sea lyrics. Yet he uses mostly the common
measures, attaining with these a free swing, a fitting of sound to
sense, that are irresistible to the many--

"Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose,
Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan--
I can rip your very heart-strings out with those."[17]

Some of his later work shows increasing seriousness of tone. _The
Recessional_ and the _Hymn before Action_ are elevated in thought and
expression. The bigness of _L'Envoi_ shows poetic power capable of
higher flights:--

"And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall
blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame;
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They
Are!"[18]

General Characteristics.--Kipling has carried to their highest
development the principles of the Bret Harte School of short story
writers. His style possesses those qualities necessary for telling a
short tale,--directness, force, suggestiveness. Rarely has any writer
so mastered the technique, the craftsmanship of this particular
literary form. He has the gift of force and dramatic power, rather
than of beauty and delicacy.

He excels in suggestive vivid description, and he draws wonderful
pictures of all out-of-doors, especially of the sea; but nature
remains merely the background for the human figures. Much of his
vividness lies in the use of specific words. If he should employ the
phraseology of his jungle laws to frame the first commandment for
writers, it would be: "_Seven times never_ be vague." Few authors have
at the very beginning of their career more implicitly heeded such a
commandment, obedience to which is evident in the following
description from _The Courting of Dinah Shadd_:--

"Over our heads burned the wonderful Indian stars, which are not
all pricked in on one plane, but preserving an orderly perspective,
draw the eye through the velvet darkness of the void up to the
barred doors of heaven itself. The earth was a grey shadow more
unreal than the sky. We could hear her breathing lightly in the
pauses between the howling of the jackals, the movement of the wi